Love in the Time of Emoji
Sidedoor
Smithsonian Institution
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When LOL just isn't enough to respond to a friend's killer joke, emoji are there for you. But for many people, there isn't an emoji to represent them or the things they want to say. This has pushed activists, designers, and straight up regular folks to create their own emoji. It's not as easy an undertaking as you might think, but every now and then one of these new emoji is so innovative it breaks the digital mold and finds itself in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In this episode of Sidedoor, we explore how one groundbreaking emoji is changing digital representation and the future of museum collections.
Guests:
Jennifer 8 Lee, Founder of EmojiNation
Andrea Lipps, Contemporary Design Curator at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
Evan Bonnstetter, Director of Product Policy for Tinder
Keith Broni, Deputy Emoji Officer for Emojipedia
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone. I don't know if you've heard the news, but this month, a slate of 15 new emoji go up for final approval, |
| 0:08.2 | meaning you may be seeing some notable and highly useful additions to your keyboard, like a shaking my head face. |
| 0:15.4 | So you can say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, without all the nose. |
| 0:19.7 | Also, a menagerie of new animals, including a few that might help with inventive name-calling, |
| 0:25.0 | like a donkey, a goose, a moose, and one of my all-time favorite animals to be afraid of, a jellyfish. |
| 0:32.3 | They are so freaky and cool. |
| 0:34.5 | So, with these exciting new emoji on the horizon we thought what better way to build |
| 0:39.2 | anticipation than with one of our favorite episodes from the side door archive love in |
| 0:44.5 | the time of emoji in it we learn about the origins of emoji what goes into designing a new |
| 0:49.5 | emoji who approves them and why these little word pictures really do matter. |
| 0:55.0 | So enjoy, and we'll be back in two weeks with a brand new story for you. |
| 1:08.3 | This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. |
| 1:12.9 | I'm Lizzie Peabody. |
| 1:17.8 | One night, Jennifer Aitley was texting her friend. |
| 1:26.4 | She was hungry. |
| 1:27.4 | And we were texting about dumplings because we are Chinese-ish women, and that is what we do. We text about food. So Jenny ups the ante. She sends her friend a picture of some tasty-looking dumplings. And then she, like, texts back, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Knife and fork, knife and fork, knife knife and fork. And the nurse is pause. And she goes, oh, Apple doesn't have a dumpling emoji. And I was like, oh, that's kind of strange. This was 2015. Jenny didn't really use emoji, but still, she was baffled. I was like, how is there no dumpling emoji, right? Because their're dumplings are universal. These things called emoji |
| 2:02.0 | were like universal. And like if there wasn't a dumpling emoji, then whatever system in place |
| 2:08.5 | has failed. So fueled by dumpling induced indignation, Jenny set out to correct this travesty. |
| 2:15.9 | After doing a little research, she discovered there was |
| 2:18.3 | a cryptic council of tech elders called the Unicode Consortium. It's like a city council that meets |
| 2:24.6 | to vote on new emoji, and other important digital things. Pile of poop with googly eyes? Yay. Trained |
| 2:31.9 | Falcon delivering Chipotle? Nay. But Jenny and her friend discovered they |
... |
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